The landing, unlike the flight, was smooth, his drug-heightened awareness making piloting the old ship suddenly easy—the women cheering from the cargo hold, some sobbing in relief.
He’d done it.
Smiling behind his mask, he turned to his Overseer as she triggered the cargo bay hatch, sirens wailing as the massive seal split apart. Metal groaned, alarms blared, and when the ramp slammed down onto the tarmac, the ship shuddered under the stampede of women rushing into open air, shaking it in a way no turbulence ever had.
Screams of delight cut short by screams of another sort. Panicked confusion, a cacophony of quickly spoken Spanish. Ship’s cameras showing the brutality of hundreds of Alpha males shoving each other in their desperation to swarm the crowd of desperate, terrified women.
Maryanne turned off the monitor that had captured Georges’s horror, pulling on his arm, barking orders to grab the bags and follow her out of a side hatch before Alpha security might stop their escape. “Do not look back! No matter what you hear or see happening to the Omegas, you cannot stop. Brenya needs you! The real mission starts now.”
A fresh wave of overlapping female screams, these even more hideous than the shrill cries of terror that had come when the ship plummeted toward the sea. These were…. They were….
“What’s an Omega?”
Shoving a heavy bag into his arms, she ordered him to follow as she kicked open the emergency exit. “Oh, sweetheart, not now. Move!”
6
Greth Dome
The fight was inevitable.The kitchen quiet, soft light glowing across polished counters, the sweet garden beyond their windows just beginning to color with dawn. Nightgown flowing silk on pale skin, black hair tousled, and green eyes sleepy, Claire moved without hurry. The morning ritual. Their ritual. Now that Shepherd had returned, they moved through the motions, Claire gathering patalcas pits from the counter, tidying after Shepherd’s green sludge breakfast… her latest failed attempt to make it taste like anything but sewage.
She’d even grown used to the disgusting smell of it, sorry that the bright-orange tropical fruit’s flesh seemed to make no difference. It probably tasted like a liquefied rotting corpse.
It certainly smelled like it.
It was hushed between them, the domestic sounds of tidying a kitchen, sleepy yawns, and the splash of water as she rinsed her tools softening the air.
There was love in her eyes, even if she was put out, as she handed her husband his meal, her hand lingering on his when he took it.
Claire’s quiet show of support.
Until her hand slipped away and hit the counter. It surprised her, that thud. That physical manifestation of what intermingled with her relief to have him back without a scratch and seemingly unharried.
Because he had offered no explanation.
He’d been inside her, on the cusp of a knot—no, more than a cusp. That throbbing, beautiful swelling had already begun. And his COM had chimed.
He’d pulled out.
There had been no completion, that specific alarm dragging him out of her arms, out of the room, with a hurried apology and a backward glance that swore he’d make it up to her.
Left breathless in their nest, leaning up on her elbows as her wide green eyes followed him out of the room, she’d not even had a real chance to ask what the emergency was.
Which meant it was either catastrophic enough to end her life, or so far removed from her world it could never touch her, no matter how badly it unraveled.
Falling back on damp sheets to pant at the ceiling, she felt the saddest end to what would have been a spectacular orgasm dwindle into nothing. Annoyed.
Sexually frustrated in a way her mateneverleft her.
Deeply worried the world was about to end.
Counting breaths before she let herself fall into a spiral she’d worked so hard to circumvent. Claire knew she had Complex PTSD. She’d been medicated into a living high back in Thólos, having learned since coming to Greth that it had been done to keep her intact in case Shepherd survived.
He had.
They knew he’d come for her.
And they knew they could not survive him a second time.
